GALLOWAY GIRLS
After WWI, Dorothée Pullinger harnessed the largely female workforce of a former Dumfries munitions factory to make cars for women
The fascinating story of the Scottish cars made by women
Marketed as ‘a car built by ladies, for those of their own sex’, the Galloway was unusual in that the company which manufactured the car in the 1920s was almost entirely staffed and run by women. That such an enterprise happened at all is testament to the extraordinary determination and vision of Dorothée Pullinger.
Born in 1894, Dorothée was the eldest of eleven children and when she was eight the family moved from France to the UK. She began her career as a draftswoman in the drawing office at the Paisley works of Scotland’s largest car manufacturer, Arrol-Johnston, where her father, car designer Thomas Pullinger, was
managing director. Dorothée’s daughter, Yvette Le Couvey, says this in itself was quite an achievement for her mother given Thomas Pullinger’s views on women in the workforce.
‘Early on my mother said she wanted to work, but her father was adamant that a woman’s place was in the home learning how to cook and wash up, so he said no. My mother didn’t find doing the washing-up interesting so I imagine she kept on at her father until he got fed up and gave in.’
In 1914 when Dorothée applied to join the Institution of Automobile Engineers, she was refused on the grounds that ‘the word person means a man and not a woman’. She was eventually admitted as their first female member in 1923, but not before she became a founding member of the Women’s Engineering Society in 1919.
During WWI, Dorothée went on to supervise 7,000 female workers as a manager at the Vickers munitions factory in Barrow-in-Furness and was awarded an MBE in 1920 for her work. After the war she returned to Scotland and persuaded her father to keep on the mainly female workforce at Arrol-Johnston’s factory in Tongland, Kirkcudbright – which had been converted to a munitions factory during the
‘Dorothée was a good engineer and a very determined, capable woman. She was a real role model’
war – and go back to making automobiles.
The Galloway Car was designed by Thomas Pullinger and heavily influenced by the Fiat 501. Dorothée was a manager and director at Galloway Motors but in her spare time she was a keen driver and liked to race, winning the Scottish Six Day Trials event with the Galloway in 1924. Yvette says her mother was instrumental in introducing many design changes to make the cars more female-friendly.
‘In those days women had long skirts so getting in the car was a bit of a performance and everything was in the wrong place for a woman. My mother altered things like making the seats adjustable so they were a bit lower for women and she put a rear view mirror in the car. People used to make a joke of this, saying that the mirror was for women to put on their lipstick, but it was so that drivers could see the car behind. Before that there were no rear view mirrors in cars.’
Other design modifications that we now take for granted were that Dorothée lowered the car steering wheel and dashboard and moved the gear and brake levers from the outside to the inside of the car. Until this time, the male-dominated car industry had made assumptions on the driver’s average height based on men rather than women. Dorothée’s support of the suffragette movement was evident in the car’s branding, explains her son Lewis Martin. ‘All the Galloway signs in the garages were painted in suffragette colours. Green, white and violet, which stood for: Give Women Votes.’
Dorothée set up a ladies engineering college for ‘educated women’ at Tongland, which also boasted a swimming pool, a tennis court on the roof, a piano room for relaxation and a hockey team. This site was closed in 1923 when car production was transferred to Arrol-Johnston’s Heathhall site in Dumfries, a multi-storey concrete-framed factory modelled on Albert Kahn’s Detroit factory for Henry Ford. Most of the surviving Galloway cars were manufactured on the Heathhall site.
Glasgow’s Riverside Museum has a 10.9 Galloway Coupé from 1924 on display and the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) has a 1927 model in its collection. Louise Innes, Principal Curator of Transport at NMS, owns a 1924 Galloway car which she bought 12 years ago because she loved the story behind the car.
‘Dorothée was a good engineer and a very determined, capable woman, she was a real role model,’ said Louise. ‘I’d love to see her more widely known. My car came from near Peterborough and it had been used as a hire car for shooting parties on the Chatswood estate as it had a soft top so the shooters could get in and out easily.
‘It was pretty worn out when it was laid up in 1930 and was not rediscovered until 1960 when someone bought and restored it. The car was originally offered to the museum in 2004 but because they already had one, I decided to buy it myself. I wouldn’t have any other car.’
‘She was constantly being told she was doing a man out of a job’
Louise often takes her Galloway car for a spin, or to local rallies, even though she admits it can be hard work to drive. ‘The car can go around 45 mph but going up a hill it can be underpowered as the steering is quite heavy and a bit vague. This makes it interesting in difficult conditions – when it’s windy or wet – as the brakes are on the back, as was common in those days, and not the front of the car.’
In their day, Galloway cars were popular for their reliability and performance. In a 1928 brochure for the Galloway Three-Seater Coupé – the aristocrat of small cars – there are glowing testimonials.
Writing on behalf of a lady client looking to sell her ‘Q’ Galloway purchased in 1925, S B Plamstead explains that the car, after clocking up 46,000 miles ‘can today still do 30 mph and 33½ mpg, and has been sold to a new owner through us for £145 cash. We think this is the most wonderful piece of running we have heard of, considering the car cost when new only £158. Nothing could be more economical.’
Another owner who took t he Galloway on a 980-mile tour with a party of four, and luggage, reported that the car was a ‘tenacious hill-climber’ with the engine and transmission running ‘quietly and strongly without trace of “shudder” or harshness at any speed.’
In total only 4,000 Galloway cars were made. The last cars came off the production line in 1928 when the Dumfries factory was closed around the time of the Wall Street crash. Latterly, when Dorothée was involved in sales, Yvette says ‘she was constantly told she was doing a man out of a job’.
Dorothée’s son, Lewis, says his mother got fed up with this accusation and decided to do a woman’s job. ‘She started a laundry in Croydon at the beginning of WWII and ended up operating around 17 laundries in the London area. The laundry was quite a place, providing they had a supply of coal and no bombs landed on them they could continue working. She had a duplicate of all the machines, just in case.’
During WWII Dorothée also served on the government’s Industrial Panel of the Ministry of Production and addressed post-war problems as a member of the Conservative and Unionist Party. In 2012 she was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame.